Nov 22, 2010
Kristina Schake to Join First Lady's Office as Communications Director http://goo.gl/fb/LySJf
Op-Ed by Vice President Joe Biden in the New York Times: "What we must do for Iraq now" http://goo.gl/fb/a9n15
Lifting Euro Area Growth: Priorities for Structural Reforms and Governance
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/spn/2010/spn1019.pdf
Statement by the President at end of the EU-U.S. Summit http://goo.gl/fb/WbYDQ
DREAM Act Gathers Momentum http://goo.gl/fb/f8FIu
Dick Lugar vs. the GOP - The senior Republican's contrarian streak may be a sign that he's raring for the fight of his political life
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704170404575624664226055500.html
White House White Board: Your Health Care Dollars http://goo.gl/fb/IxLZj
The Doctor Con - The AMA gets its payment fix—for all of four weeks
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704170404575624643400449172.html
Press Conference of the President after NATO Summit http://goo.gl/fb/KkgOe
Remembering JFK in an Age of Terror - He offered no apology for our strength, declaring we have both the 'will and weapons' to defend freedom
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703506904575592783814697048.html
President Obama at NATO: "And Today We Stand United in Afghanistan" http://goo.gl/fb/YiLEZ
The EPA Permitorium - The agency's regulatory onslaught has stopped new power generation
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704658204575610924168519824.html
Larry Summers in the WSJ
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703628204575619250079601996.html
Higher Taxes Won't Reduce the Deficit - History shows that when Congress gets more revenue, the pols spend it
http://on.wsj.com/dwd4e8
In China's Orbit
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704104104575622531909154228.html
The 'Build America' Debt Bomb - The state and city fiscal mess is getting worse, yet the Obama administration wants Congress to make new taxpayer-subsidized bonds permanent
http://digs.by/b2nCYc
North Korea Nuclear Claims Set Off Scramble http://on.wsj.com/9SBIeG
Scourge of Humankind - High-profile efforts to fight malaria confront an ever-changing enemy that has evolved alongside man http://on.wsj.com/dmmeI6
India's GDP to grow at 9.3% on avg till 2030: StanChart
http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/economy/india39s-gdp-to-grow-at-93avg-till-2030-stanchart_500370.html
Kracked Up Over Krakatoa: Models Have It All Wrong
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/11/17/kracked-up-over-kratatoa-models-have-it-all-wrong/
Monday, November 22, 2010
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For a critique of the Wall Street Journal's error-ridden and wrongheaded editorial, "EPA Permitorium," see http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/jwalke/the_wall_street_journal_editor.html.
ReplyDeleteThe EPA Permitorium - The agency's regulatory onslaught has stopped new power generation - Part I
ReplyDeletePresident Obama is now retrenching after his midterm rebuke, and one of the main ways he'll try to press his agenda is through the alphabet soup of the federal regulators. So a special oversight priority for the new Congress ought to be the Environmental Protection Agency, which has turned a regulatory firehose on U.S. business and the power industry in particular.
The scale of the EPA's current assault is unprecedented, yet it has received almost no public scrutiny. Since Mr. Obama took office, the agency has proposed or finalized 29 major regulations and 172 major policy rules. This surge already outpaces the Clinton Administration's entire first term—when the EPA had just been handed broad new powers under the 1990 revamp of air pollution laws.
Another measure of the EPA's aggressiveness are the six major traditional pollutants that the agency polices, such as ozone or sulfur dioxide. No Administration has ever updated more than two of these rules in a single term, and each individual rule has tended to run through a 15-year cycle on average since the Clean Air Act passed in 1970. Under administrator Lisa Jackson, the EPA is stiffening the regulations for all six at the same time.
The hyperactive Ms. Jackson is also stretching legal limits to satisfy the White House's climate-change goals, now that Senate Democrats have killed cap and trade. The EPA's "endangerment finding" on carbon is most controversial, but other parts of her regulatory ambush may be more destructive by forcing mass retirements of the coal plants that provide half of America's electricity.
A case study in the Jackson method is the EPA's recent tightening of air-quality standards for sulfur dioxide. The draft SO2 rule was released for the formal period of public comment last December. Yet the final rule published in June suddenly included a "preamble" that rewrote 40-odd years of settled EPA policy.
The EPA has heretofore measured the concentration of pollutants in the ambient air by, well, measuring the concentration of pollutants in the ambient air. The preamble throws out this sampling and ultraviolet testing and substitutes computer estimations of what air quality might be. The EPA favors modelling because it can plug in the data and assumptions of its choosing, like how often a power plant is running at maximum capacity. Gaming the models will allow the agency to punish states and target individual plants, even if actual measurements show that SO2 is under the new EPA standard.
The EPA is within its legal discretion to reinterpret clean-air laws—but not without any prior warning, and the preamble surprise violates years of case law about federal rule-making. Worse, the agency hasn't gotten around to detailing how the models should be built or how the analysis must be conducted. Without any ground rules for approval, the permits required for any major energy or construction projects can't be issued.
The uncertainty created by the SO2 rule and similar rule-makings has resulted in a near-total freeze on EPA permits, imposing a de facto project moratorium that will last for the next 18 months at minimum. North Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, South Dakota and Nevada are already suing the EPA because of the restrictions they now face on their "ability to permit new sources or expand existing sources," and many more states are expected to join them.
The EPA Permitorium - The agency's regulatory onslaught has stopped new power generation - Part II
ReplyDeleteThe same goes for the EPA plan to require "maximum achievable control technology" on a plant-by-plant basis to nearly every coal- or oil-fired utility in the country to limit pollutants like mercury. The EPA started writing that rule while the data that will supposedly inform its decision were still being collected. Then there's the upcoming "boiler rule," which the EPA's lowball estimate says will impose $9.5 billion in new capital costs on manufacturers, paper mills, hospitals and the like. There are so many others.
The electric industry in particular is being forced to choose between continuing to operate and facing major capital expenditures to meet the increasingly strict burden, or else shutting down and building replacements that use more expensive sources like natural gas. Either way, the costs will be passed through to business and consumers as higher rates, which is the same as a tax increase. The general consensus is that as much as a third of the U.S. coal-fired fleet will be retired by 2016, costing north of $100 billion—a consensus that includes an important federal advisory agency, as we wrote last month in "The Unseen Carbon Agenda."
Ms. Jackson responded to that editorial in a letter that waved off any criticism of her industrial policy as merely opposition to "common-sense efforts to reduce harmful pollution." And it's true that some of these costs might be justified if they resulted in real environmental improvements like less acid rain.
Yet return to sulfur dioxide: SO2 emissions fell by 56% between 1980 and 2008, despite a 70% increase in fossil fuel-based electric generation over the same period. With current levels so low, the EPA's own 168-page analysis estimates that the direct benefits of the new SO2 regulations will amount to all of $12 million nationwide in 2020. Liquidating the EPA budget would yield better returns.
At least 56 Senators in next year's Congress are on record supporting bills that would freeze the EPA's carbon regulation for a time or strip the agency of its self-delegated powers. But the EPA is still pursuing the same agenda through other means, harming business expansion, job creation and economic growth. A key task for the next Congress will be to start pushing back.